The Unwinnable War
by eleanoralovesananias
Summary: It might not have been the best idea to make an enemy of David Robert Jones. With John in a coma, Sherlock and Mary enlist the help of the eccentric Bishop family for an unorthodox solution. But the inside of a combat veteran's mind turns out to be a lot more than they bargained for. **Triggers, triggers, everywhere**
1. Chapter 1

John had never screamed so loudly.

 _His first active combat mission. He was supposed to stay in the Jeep. Nothing could hurt him there. He was just going to watch. He was a medic. He wasn't in any danger. No one would hurt a medic._

 _He rolled down the window, looking anxiously around, searching for some sign of the others. The silence was absolute and unbearable. A battle in the movies had a defineable arc of exposition, build-up, loud, obligatory chaos, and then everyone went home. There was no_ waiting _. In reality, most of war seemed to be made up of sitting around waiting to be shot._

 _The driver glared pointedly at him, and he quickly, timidly rolled the window back up. "Sorry," he muttered._

 _The young woman sitting next to him, gun comfortably across her lap, grinned amusedly at him. "First mission, doctor?" she asked in a thick American drawl._

 _He turned red. "Yeah. You?"_

 _She snorted. "I've been here for a while." She watched him turn to check out the window for enemies for the millionth time - it was like he'd developed a twitch. He didn't know how to stop. "You really need to relax."_

 _"How?" he asked frustratedly. "Everyone keeps telling me that. How am I supposed to relax when I could die at any minute?"_

 _"Because there's nothing you can do about it," she replied matter-of-factly. "This ain't the way war used to be. Time was, whether you lived or died depended on how good you were. The machine gun changed all that. Nobody can counter it. You can't outrun it, you can't block it, you can't strategy your way out of getting shot. If you die, it's because you were standing in the wrong place, or you looked the wrong way, or you tried to shoot back. It's luck, that's all. Luck of the draw. Spending your whole life looking over your shoulder isn't going to save your life. It'll just make what's left of it a living nightmare. War's enough of_ that _without you helping it along. So just relax and do your job, doctor."_

 _He would never know what he would have said back. She didn't even have time to finish the last word. The shot came out of nowhere._

 _One minute there was nothing. The next minute she had no head._

 _There was blood spattered all over his face, bits of brain glued to his skin and up his nose and stuck in the corner of his mouth._

 _He screamed. More blood. In his mouth. The taste was like being on fire. He kept screaming. He could barely hear the gunfire._

 _"Come_ on, _medic! Get out here! We've got wounded!"_

 _He shook his head frantically, knees pulled up to his chest. He wasn't thinking anymore._

 _"God_ damn _it, medic!" A hand roughly pulled him out of the Jeep. He stumbled forward and saw the soldier, writhing on the sandy ground, clutching his stomach, one arm thrown across his eyes to shield him from the sun. He couldn't have been more than nineteen, his pasty face spattered with freckles and blood._

 _John's head cleared. He knew how to deal with this. He knew what to do. Just focus on the work. Just relax and do your job, doctor. Just relax and do your job, doctor. The words kept repeating in his head._

 _He knelt and coaxed him to remove his hand from the wound. His hands started shaking again when he saw. There was so much blood. He could see the intestines. He forced himself to open his medical kit and start working. He could do it. Cauterize. Clean. Stitch. Bandage. He could do it._

 _His hands were covered in blood. It just kept coming. There was so much of it. The boy's face was turning pale. He saw his eyelids flutter. No. No. I've almost got it stitched. You can't die now._

 _But the proof was thick and coagulated all around him. He'd lost too much blood. His head tilted to one side. The heart was loud and curiously slowed down against his fingers. He'd taken too long. He hadn't been there when he still could have saved. No. Wait. Please wait. Just a moment longer. I can do it. I can still save you._

 _His gaze was caught, trapped like flies in amber, by the boy's green eyes. There was so much life in those eyes. And then there wasn't._

Mary shook him, forced him awake, tore him out of that endless war that could never be won, like she'd done so many times. He howled, buried his face in her chest, and sobbed like a little boy.

She held him tight and stroked his hair, soothing and 'shh'ing him, wishing she could do something substantial to help him. If anyone should have to go through this every night - which she sincerely doubted - it should be _her._

Yet here he was, tormented, afraid to go to sleep at night, shouldering bravely through every day resolved and resigned to this living hell, while she felt nothing. She was no psychopath; that was just the only excuse she could come up with. She was perfectly capable of love. She loved John. Yet she never felt a thing about killing.

She wasn't afraid of death. Anyone's death. It had never made sense to her what the big deal was. Everyone died, what was the matter in going a little early? But John didn't feel the same - the man who cared and loved more than anyone else, who had cared and loved enough to forgive her. He shouldn't have to go through this.


	2. Chapter 2

John and Mary ate breakfast together like always, sitting around the cheap table they'd bought to furnish their little flat. Between John's meager salary working nursing homes and children's hospitals, and Mary's inability to get a job because of her lack of actual background, they did the best they could.

The two of them, peas in a pod, both chafed at routine. But over their short marriage, they had built up a few carefully guarded traditions. This was one of them. Every day, they pulled up chairs next to each other and relaxed for a few minutes.

Mary's long legs crossed easily over her chair, John's arm warm and peaceful around her narrow shoulders, her blonde hair dribbling across his sweater, lashed eyes half closed. The paper, the tea, the sun diving and swooping through the window. This was what heaven must be like.

These were rare, treasured moments when the two of them, warriors both with a leaden past, could sit in the sun and live the lives that could have been. John almost wept at how lucky he was to have been found by all this. Mary was never teary, but the ghostly quality of her smile said what she couldn't express.

John got up, put his plate away and kissed his wife goodbye. On his way out the door, he gave an affectionate rub to the polished wood of their one luxury item - a beautiful midcentury hoosier cabinet, their purchase with the money that had been a wedding gift from Sherlock. It made him think of the little family he'd built since he'd returned from the war.

Mary watched him leave and slipped out her smartphone, sending off a quick text to Sherlock. _Doing well today. Bad dreams last night, but he seems to have forgotten them._

Sherlock and she kept a constant tally of John's mental state, born out of their worry about his PTSD. What Sherlock didn't know is that she did the exact same thing with John for the detective's addiction.

She half-smiled at the thought that her skills at manipulating people were invaluable as a wife and a friend. She never would have imagined it when she was still using them to kill.

Those had been dark times, without question. Being an assassin was dark and dirty work, work that required cutting your soul loose and gliding on ruthless efficiency alone. She had always been so good at it. She could disassociate with the best of them. She'd done things that would make her honorable husband never see her the same again. But it simply didn't affect her.

There was a switch in the darkest parts of her mind that could simply turn her off. She could become a selfless, unconscious, emotionless killing machine if she needed to. She'd seen for herself that everyone had that switch. Everybody had a button that would make them kill without remorse. For John it was the people he loved. For Sherlock it was his personal dignity. But she could flip that switch with ease. Even her memories from that time were black and white, colorless without emotion or meaning.

Mary's mind was a black-and-white photograph, dotted with color where her loved ones stood like giants over the flat expanse of her thoughts. She never wondered about what anyone else's mind would look like. She never expected to find out.


	3. Chapter 3

As John left for work, Sherlock was on his knees in a back alley, carefully examining the bloodstain on the wall and the ground where the corpse had been moved. His left knee was submerged in a garbage bag full of something that smelled like rotten lettuce, but his focus was absolute.

His fingers raked through a spot where blood had globbed thickly onto the wall, testing its viscosity, and his eyes pierced a half-smoked cigarette with its yellow butt poking out of the blood like a sinking ship, a smear of ash where it had been put out at a curious diagonal angle floating in the blood.

Sherlock Holmes was one of the most alluring men in the public eye. The whole world looked up at his huge, dashing shadow: the whole idea of this tall, pale, handsome vampire of a man who saw inscrutable patterns in the world and used them to fight the forces of evil, who had sold his soul at a crossroads for those brooding eyes and this damned, holy life.

With the nature of idolizers, they never imagined that most of his time was spent not in the thrill of the chase, but in moments like this, kneeling in spoiled cabbage in a dirty alleyway.

Sherlock finished his analysis, stood up, and texted Lestrade. _Murder near Baker Street. Investigating. Come secure the crime scene. P.S. Bring coffee._

Lestrade sprang up from his chair and readied himself to go home. He was throwing his messenger bag over his shoulder when his phone buzzed.

The D.I. sighed. He'd been around Scotland Yard as long as Sherlock had, and he'd developed a sixth sense for the detective's presence. When he pulled out his phone, he was already opening the box of doughnuts back up. Sugar was his alternative to drinking.

Sherlock had headed off by the time the police got there, which meant there were no statements to take and no evidence to collect, only a puddle of blood and a group of tired, fussy officers who had to be pacified with coffee and raspberry cremés.

Sherlock, meanwhile, was on the hunt. He was almost glad John wasn't with him, because this was a dark and dirty case, and the consulting detective was uneasy. He was ankle deep in something he didn't quite understand, which meant he couldn't protect anyone who happened to be helping him. That meant severe limitations: no backup from Lestrade, no insight from John, no string-pulling from Mycroft, not even the use of Molly's lab.

Three days ago, a young woman in a hospital gown had walked into a library and begged for food, appearing desparately hungry. The librarian on duty had left the room momentarily to call the emergency number. When he returned, thirteen people, including the young woman, had been ripped limb from limb and mutilated horribly. The librarian was the only survivor.

Several minutes later, twelve of the bodies had crumbled into dust. The police refused to believe the librarian, even after he showed photgraphs he had taken of the bodies. Only Sherlock accepted the case.

His client had only under pressure admitted the final piece of the puzzle so far. The body of the young woman had disappeared. He had turned his back to vomit at seeing the gruesome sight, and when he had turned back, the young woman's mutilated body had disappeared entirely.

Since then, puddles of blood mixed with the same brown dust he had taken as evidence from the library had been popping up all over the city. This most recent one had been special. The cigarette. No other victim had dropped a personal effect, or any trace of them at all. Therefore Lestrade was needed to secure the crime scene, but it would be too dangerous to actually talk to him about the case, or even to be seen with him.

Worst of all, Sherlock knew he was being hunted. Since he had started investigating, he had seen men in black jumpsuits photgraphing him out of unmarked vans. And at every crime scene, plus at Baker Street and every place he'd stopped to rest along the way, a small emblem of a butterfly had been chalked in some convenient place. This was more than a serial killer. This was a terrorist organization.

It was becoming terribly clear that something awful was going on. It was too late to pull out. Sherlock only hoped he would survive it.


End file.
